Immigration to Canajoharie

The area around present day Canajoharie has been called home by a wide variety of peoples over the past few centuries. Prior to around 1600 the area was the home of the Mahican, an Algonquin tribe that was pushed to the south and east when the Mohawks migrated from the St. Lawrence sometime between 1500 and 1600. Soon after they arrived the Mohawks were instrumental in developing the Iroquois confederacy. Both the Algonquin and Iroquois lived in long houses and palisade villages, and subsisted through a combination of hunting, fishing and agriculture. The name “Canajoharie” is said to be a Mohawk description of a 10 foot deep geologic pothole located in the local creek bed.

The first Europeans to venture into the valley eventually named after the most recent Native American "immigrants", the Mohawks, were Dutch traders coming west from Albany, then called Fort Orange; and French missionaries and traders traveling down from the St. Lawrence. The French established colonies in Quebec in 1603, and the first missionaries to reach the Mohawk were here by 1616. Meanwhile, the Dutch established a settlement near Albany in 1614. Both of these groups had settlements in the New World, and were engaged in the fur trade with the Mohawks near Canajoharie, well before the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in 1620. It would, however, be 100 years before permanent settlement came to the Canajoharie area.

That settlement came in 1723 when the English, who had wrested New York from the Dutch in 1652, and established a settlement at Fort Hunter in 1711, granted the Stone Arabia Patent to the Palatines. The Palatines were German refugees of the religious wars of the Reformation. The English allowed the Palatines to settle on English colonial land in exchange for labor, and to populate the colonies. Unlike the French and Dutch, the Palatines were interested primarily in settlement, and the farming communities that they built were the beginning of European settlement in the area. The Palatines remained the dominant ethnic group in the area until well after the American Revolution, and many area residents can trace their families back to these early settlers. A few Scots, Irish and Dutch were a tiny local minority.

The VanAlstyne House, built 1750. Photograph circa 1890. An Example of a dwelling of a 16th century immigrant.

Items brought from Germany by the Voght family, 1889. Christmas ornaments, cookie cutters and crimper still used by the family in 2002.

The Mohawk Valley was one of the battlegrounds of the Revolution, and the population was decimated. Those who chose to align with the patriots suffered tremendous losses in various battles and raids, and the Loyalists fared even worse, as they were largely driven from their homes and became refugees in Canada. After independence was gained, immigration began again, much of it secondary immigration of English, Scots and Irish who had previously settled in New England. The next significant wave of immigration was Irish laborers who built the Erie Canal. However, like the Dutch and French before them, the canal workers did not come to settle, but continued west with the railroads. Thus, the community maintained its German and British ethnicity through the middle 1800s.

Up until the 1870s the Irish and Germans were the predominant immigrant groups. Although there still was significant immigration from Britain and Germany, large numbers began coming from other European countries, including Italy and eastern Europe. There was even a significant African American population in the 1850s and 1860s. This new immigration, while it sometimes produced alarm in the descendants of previous immigrants, continued to be important in the development of the region. Just as the Irish laborers who built the canal and the railroads contributed greatly to the development of the community in the early 1800s by working at the jobs that the established residents didn't want, so the Italians, Poles and other eastern Europeans who came in the late 1800s and early 1900s contributed by working in the factories of a rapidly industrializing community. Indeed, the success of Arkell & Smiths and Beech-Nut was due in part to the readily available labor force that the new immigrants provided.

Dancers of Bombazo Latino, Centro Civico, Amsterdam, 2002, part of a well established Puerto Rician community.

Area population stabilized again in the middle 1900s, both in number and in ethnic make-up. The two World Wars, and the national restrictions placed on immigration in the 1920s and 30s had their affect on the numbers of newcomers to the area. More recently, however, immigration has increased again. These modern immigrants, like those who settled here earlier, came to escape turmoil or for economic opportunity. The new immigrants include the Puerto Ricians, Eastern Europeans from former Iron Curtain countries, and Mexican farm workers. These groups are continuing the tradition of immigrants settling in the Canajoharie area to better their lives.

Resources for Further StudyWepman, Dennis. Immigration: From the founding of Virginia to the closing of Ellis Island. New York: Facts On File. 2002.

History of Montgomery and Fulton counties, N.Y., with illustrations descriptive of scenery ... and portraits of old pioneers and prominent residents. Interlaken, N.Y. : Heart of the Lakes Pub., 1981, 1979.

Bode, Janet. The Colors of Freedom. New York: Franklin Watts. 1999.

Maestro, Betsy. Coming to America : the story of immigration. New York : Scholastic, c1996.

This exhibit was made possible in part by an Outreach grant provided by the Mohawk Valley Library System, 2002.